Jeffrey Goldberg: Hillary Clinton line seemed like ‘shot’ at President Obama

Jeffrey Goldberg on Monday dissected his interview with Hillary Clinton, saying she took “a bit of a shot” at President Barack Obama and his foreign policy.

Appearing on MSNBC, the Atlantic journalist who interviewed Clinton was asked about the former secretary of State’s comments that an Obama foreign policy quip — “Don’t do stupid stuff” — was not an adequate “organizing principle.”

Text Size

“[W]hen she says, that’s not an organizing principle — and people understand that to be one of Barack Obama’s organizing principles — it does seem like a bit of a shot,” Goldberg said.

He added that her comments on the issue underscore a significant stylistic difference between Obama and Clinton, who served in the administration during the president’s first term.

“What she’s saying is that, ‘My organizing principle is, we defeated Communism and we’re going to defeat jihadism,’” Goldberg said of Clinton. “Barack Obama, as you well know, is allergic to that kind of sweeping language.”

The interview, conducted last week and published over the weekend, was perhaps Clinton’s largest break from Obama, whom she has strongly supported since leaving the State Department. On Syria — in what Goldberg called the “single sharpest point of disagreement” between Clinton and Obama expressed in the interview — she suggested that the president’s failure to arm the Syrian rebels earlier in the conflict helped created a security “vacuum” now filled by jihadists. Goldberg said that Clinton, who advocated a more hawkish foreign policy on several issues during her time in the Cabinet, might feel “vindicated in her position” that the U.S. should have intervened in Syria earlier.

“Hillary hedged in this interview,” Goldberg told Andrea Mitchell. “And she’s not attacking the president, but I think she felt like, ‘You know what, I thought this, and I think events are bearing out the truth of what I advocated for.’”

Mitchell asked Goldberg about Clinton and Obama’s differences on Israel, noting that Clinton seemed to be more resolutely siding with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “Hillary doesn’t think that differently [from Obama],” he said. “I think she’s running for president and he’s not and she knows that Israel remains, according to polls, a popular cause in America.”

Goldberg added that Clinton’s more unequivocal answer supporting Israel lacked some “nuance,” adding that her message to the U.S. public and Netanyahu was: “[Obama] had a tough relationship with Israel; I’m going to have a smoother relationship with Israel.”